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Especially when it comes to ATA external storage boxes and ATA drives on RAID controllers, there is no way that the drive vendor's FW update feature can be used without connecting the drives to legacy controller. If not today, may be some day in the near future, when the drive FW becomes complex and updates are mandated, we need a standard mechanism for FW update. I am not aware of any secret tie ups between the drive vendors and HBA vendors. So forgive my innocence. So far from the emails threads, I infer that "DOWNLOAD MICROCODE" command is used for drive FW update with some special sequence specific to device vendor. I agree Hale, that knowing the command code is just a tip of the iceberg in the FW updation. But why not this be a part of the standard ? SCSI folks seems to have a standard mechanism for FW updates and why not ATA have such a thing ? And that 'someone' who asked the question is just me. :-) Regards, Gana ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hale Landis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [t13] ATA Drive firmware update. > This message is from the T13 list server. > > > On Thu, 09 Jan 2003 10:42:09 -0800, Gary Laatsch wrote: > > >The firmware update stuff is mostly used during development and qual cycles > >at customer sites. Correct, most end users would never use the feature. > >But it can be invaluable to someone like a TiVo or someone developing RAID > >systems to not have to pull the drive(s) out, find a PC and do an FW update > >than put the drives back if it ever is. > > And that is fine... I'm sure TiVo and those RAID designers have lots > of NDAs with various drive manufacturers for the info that is needed > to perform such firmware upgrades. You need those NDAs because you > are not going to get the information any other way and you need to > close contacts with the disk drive manufacturers because they change > the firmware update methods all the time. Knowing the ATA commadn > code(s) to use in order to update the firmware is probably only 10 > percent of what you need to know. > > >Besides the reflector has been way to quiet.... > > Could that be because T13 really doesn't have a purpose anymore? I > really wonder why, especially in this economy, companies continue to > send people to the T13 meetings. Why do that when all the real work > is done in various secret society meetings all under NDAs? Oh yea, I > know why... Do you? > > > > *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com *** >
